Books
Katherine Waters
We've all been there. The disappointing fling. The gently shattered illusions. The abortive holiday eliding languor and boredom. Teenage ennui. Revels peopled by runaways. Talking animals. Talking animals? Well, fine. Not quite.Sea Monsters is Chloe Aridjis’s third novel. It is the story of seventeen year old Luisa’s escape to the Oaxaca coast. She’s a clever girl with foreign university on the horizon and a vague sense that there’s more to life than the cycle of exams and gay goth nightclubs that characterise her existence in Mexico City.With the object of her romantic affections — Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A one-night stand between a female college student, Margot, whose part-time job is selling snacks at the cinema, and thirtyish Robert, a customer, goes pathetically awry. It was disappointing, uneasy, perhaps more, and memorialised in all its edgy discomfort in Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”, published in the New Yorker in December 2017. The tale hit the #MeToo zeitgeist, charting a deeply unsatisfactory sexual encounter, where the girl just thinks it’s more trouble to stop than continue. The tale went ballistic, with something like four million hits on the net. And now it is the centre Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In this memoir, subtitled “Paris Among the Artists”, Michael Peppiatt presents his 1960s self as an absorbed, irritatingly immature and energetically heterosexual young man let loose in Paris to find himself (or not). The young art historian, already a bemused platonic acolyte of Francis Bacon, whom he had met when interviewing the artist for a student publication, had been pushed by his Francophile father to cross the Channel. Paris was to define his life, loves and profession for at least a quarter of a century. He seemed relatively clear-sighted early on about the city’s allure and its Read more ...
Katherine Waters
This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his mistress Mrs Temes, upright headteacher Mr Elekes and his slovenly and unconventional wife Mrs Elekes.Almost as soon as Henriette, the diminutive daughter of the Helds, begins to explore the house, she is ambushed by her mother at the threshold of her new bedroom and introduced – in the assured, declaratory manner of adults – to the Elekes Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
John Lanchester’s fifth novel begins with a kind of coded warning to the reader – and, perhaps, to the author too. Freezing conditions plague life on the defensive wall – or “National Coastal Defence Structure” – that protects a future Britain from incursions by climate-change migrants in small boats. The weather invites fancy metaphorical comparisons. This cold may feel like “slate, or diamond, or the moon”. Yet those punishing temperatures are really “just a physical fact… Cold is cold is cold.” Likewise, The Wall teases us into a range of tempting, figurative interpretations. It may be a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Reasons to be cheerful? A fortissimo blast of anguish and foreboding currently sounds from both those end-of-year round-ups that look back over the past twelve months, and the doomy previews that dwell on the travails of our immediate future. So, in a whistle-in-the-dark spirit, here is a selection of twenty outstanding books published in Britain during 2018 that offer, if not outright hope, then perspective, illumination, wisdom and even a touch of creative transcendence. Read them in early 2019 and the present may not look like quite such a demoralising place. FictionPat Barker, The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In 1955, Sylvia Plath attended the Advent Carol Service at King’s College in Cambridge. Like countless other visitors, listeners and viewers before and since, she was entranced by “the tall chapel, with its cobweb lace of fan-vaulting” lit by “myriads of flickering candles”, and above all by the “clear bell-like” voices of the choristers, with their “utterly pure and crystal notes”. The American poet told her mother in a letter that “I never have been so moved in my life”. For a century now – the first Christmas service took place in 1918 – the “unearthly silvery glitter” of carols sung by Read more ...
David Nice
If you're seeking ideas for new playlists and diverse suggestions for reading - and when better to look than at this time of year? - then beware: you may be overwhelmed by the infectious enthusiasms of Ed Vulliamy, hyper-journalist, witness-bearer, true Mensch and member of the first band to spit in public (as far as he can tell). Anyone who in a single paragraph can convincingly yoke together Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn, the blues of both Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson, and Bob Marley is clearly a seer as well as an eclectic true original. Elsewhere, Dylan is connected to Dvořák Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the protagonist of Boris Akunin’s series of historical thrillers, is an elegant, eccentric sometime government servant, spy and diplomat, as well as engineer, independent detective and free spirit. He is a completely assured personality, who nevertheless stammers in ordinary conversation. And he is very fond of risk.This well-travelled Muscovite is visiting Yalta to pay homage to the memory of his hero, Chekhov, thus already utilising the mix of real history and fiction that is Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If you believe the bulk of the “books of the year” features that drift like stray tinsel across the media at this time of year, Britain’s literary taste-makers only enjoy the flavours of the Anglosphere. With a handful of exceptions, the sort of cultural and political notables invited to select their favourite reading overwhelmingly endorse titles from the UK or US. For our book-tipping elite, it seems, a hard literary Brexit happened decades ago. Yet publishing history tells a different story. The sales volume for translations of literary fiction released in the UK has doubled since the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time, a high-powered publisher and politician named Charles Darke quits his posts, regresses to a child-like state, and frolics in the woods like a ten-year-old. It often seems as if the British ruling class has nurtured, and still nurtures, more than its fair share of Charles Darkes. We could all name the Peter Pans of politics today. Less transparent, however, are those figures who do not act like spoilt, entitled kids in the public sphere, but remain privately enslaved to the child within. Consider, for instance, the Secretary of the Bank of England Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Daša Drndić, the Croatian author who died in June aged 71, has posthumously won the second Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her coruscating novel Belladonna. The award, set up last year to help rectify the acute, and long-standing, gender imbalance among authors translated into English, is supported by the University of Warwick. This year, the panel of judges again consisted of Professors Amanda Hopkinson and Susan Bassnett – both eminent translators, and teachers of the art – and myself. We read 53 submitted works (an encouragingly sharp hike compared to 2017) across a broad Read more ...